Children Shouldn't
by Libek
Summary: Bookman encounters a certain small child for the first time, and takes him under his wing for... obvious reasons. Rated for dark unpleasantness.


Bookman found him sitting in the dirt, in the middle of a decimated village. A small boy, no older than five or six, his back to the destruction, intent on a game he himself had invented, the only living soul for miles.

Immediately he was intrigued. There was plenty of shade, and the village well was not one of the structures destroyed by the conflict, but the child should have been malnourished, weak, and on the verge of collapse. Judging by the state of the corpses here, the village had been like this for a month or more.

Nor, Bookman observed, as he came closer, was the boy curled in on himself or whispering feverishly. Had he been away from the village when fighting broke out, or was he merely in a state of shock?

The boy finally looked up at him when his shadow blocked out the sun. His face was smudged with dirt, yet he did not stink. He was bathing regularly, then: using some of his precious water in an activity that few children enjoyed. But it was the eyes that really got and held his attention. Bright, watchful, intelligent green eyes.

Bookman hesitated briefly, considering questions, but finally decided to start with the simple things. "Hello," he said.

The boy stared at him for a long moment, so long that he wondered if he had been wrong (perhaps the child was mute from trauma), and finally nodded his head in acknowledgment. "Hello."

"What are you doing here?"

"I live here," the boy said simply, but his eyes were intent. "What are _you_ doing here? It's fifty-eight miles to the nearest trading post, and that's if you've got a horse with you."

_Very intelligent._

"...I came to see the remains of the city," Bookman told him truthfully. "And I do have a horse. It's tied up on the outskirts of the village. I didn't want it to trample anything until I had had a chance to look around. I'm... a historian, I suppose you might say. I wanted to record the village exactly as it was."

The child blinked, then looked down at his makeshift "toys" again. "Why would you want to record this place? It was nothing special, even before the attack."

_A sense of proportion._

Bookman smiled, very slightly. "I record everything. I'll even record you."

"What do you wanna know?"

And that was it: no protest; no confusion; no hesitation. Bookman gazed down at him thoughtfully.

"Do your parents live in this village with you?"

The boy began to scratch lines in the dirt with one of his "toys". "They did," he said. "My father was twenty years older than my mother, and they hadn't been married all that long. I was the third of five children, see? It was getting hard on my mother, her hips are narrow, but she probably would have had another, maybe died in childbirth. They're both dead now."

_No family._

He didn't sound particularly concerned. Bookman said, more carefully, "You're lucky to be alive yourself."

"Not really," the boy said carelessly. "It's not like the soldiers didn't see me. They did -- Mom's screaming took care of that. But they left a lot of the kids alive. The ones under eight. I guess they figured we'd die out here, with all the horses and food stolen. It worked with everyone else. But I'm not stupid."

"Oh?"

The child gestured vaguely around the broken street. "There's plenty to eat," he said. "You just have to know where to look."

Bookman nodded, accepting that, and then asked him straight out. "Was it difficult, to eat your mother's body?"

A snort. "Really difficult," the boy agreed. "The only knife I could find was dull, so I had to sharpen it first -- otherwise it never would've cut through her skin, let alone her bone. Still easier to manage than Dad, though. Wish the kids my age hadn't taken so long to die. They were easier to lift, easier to cut up."

_Appropriately detached._

In fact, Bookman wondered if the boy wasn't _too_ detached. Had he really felt nothing at all? But the boy lifted his head, and, as if sensing his thoughts, sighed.

"We're all just animals," he said. "And it's not even like I killed them. I just didn't let their bodies go to waste. Besides, it's better than shoving them in the ground or burning their bodies. The grease and fat and other things can't make the air dirty or poison the water."

Bookman smiled. "I agree completely," he told the child, standing. "How do you know all of this?"

To his surprise, the boy looked almost sullen. "Because I listen," he said shortly. "I pay attention. Adults talk in front of children all the time, you know. They never think we'll understand them. But I do. So I know to purify the blade before I cut anything I plan on eating, and I know to cook the meat until it's crispy. There's a little salt left, so I use it to keep the meat for longer. I'm not _stupid_. Be sure to put that down."

"I'm sure you aren't," Bookman told him. "A stupid boy could never have survived this long. Tell me, what is your name?"

The child's irritable expression eased, and he looked curious again. "Why do you want to know?" he asked. "Names don't mean anything."

"Indeed," Bookman said, amused. "I myself have no name. I am known only as the Bookman."

"Oh yeah? You don't look like a book," the boy told him unflinchingly. "They should call you the Pandaman instead." Then, before Bookman could even digest that bizarre assertion, his green eyes had turned shrewd. "_The_ Bookman? The only one in all the world?"

"No," he admitted, slowly. Still not quite certain of his decision. "There are often two -- a master, and an apprentice, who will take over when the master dies. Which," he added, "I won't be doing any time soon."

But eventually, every Bookman had to find a successor. They were none of them immortal.

The boy looked up at him for a beat longer, considering, perhaps even wondering what he had gotten himself into by having this conversation. "And a Bookman is a historian," he said with some confidence. "But a special kind of historian, one who records everything and everyone. Does that mean you know everything there is to know?" There was envy in his voice; maybe even hunger.

_Endlessly questioning, endlessly curious._

"Not everything," Bookman told him, mostly to watch the light in his young eyes dim. It brightened up again, an almost fevered intensity, when he added, "But much more than anyone else knows."

He reached out a hand, and the boy took it, rising up off his knees eagerly. How bored this child must have been, growing up in a tiny isolated village where so little had ever happened.

"What _was_ your name?" he tried again.

This time, the boy told him.

They left his "toys" behind in the village. Even bleached in the sun and no doubt cleaned as meticulously as a child with limited resources could manage, human rib bones were distinctly unsanitary.


End file.
